Author: CSTonline

Last Monday, Britain invented television… all over again. A load of people watched the same programme at the same time, at the moment of first broadcast. At one point, 9.27 million people, 34.64% of the TV audience, was watching...

Guy Hibbert is no stranger to controversial drama. No Child of Mine – his rendering of an horrific real-life child abuse case brilliantly directed by Peter Kosminsky – was one of the most disturbing and moving...

I talked to a cab driver the day after Margaret Thatcher died. He was worried about congestion during her funeral the following Wednesday. Should he respect his birthday and take the day off, as planned, or cash in on the...

I have always been fascinated, perhaps even obsessed, with my eyes. I have often felt them looking into things, as if they had their own embodied consciousness that I was entirely, simultaneously, conscious of. It was as if we,...

In 1986, in a now infamous Saturday Night Live sketch, William Shatner told fans at a Star Trek convention to ‘Get a Life!’.   Drawing upon every cliché of the Trekkie, the sketch playfully mocks the obsessive and socially...

I do not intend all my blogs to be about 3D, but two days at the excellent 3D Creative Summit, organised by Ravensbourne, has provided a number of useful ideas on which to ruminate. For me, the event started off badly when Jim...

Even before its first episode was transmitted in April last year, The Undateables (Channel 4, 2012- ) polarised opinion. Promoted as ‘an uplifting… series [which] follows the journeys of several extraordinary singletons as...

I’m not a great sports fan. I enjoy the Olympics, tennis and darts when they happen to be on the telly, but I’ve never suffered the agonies and ecstasies of loyally supporting a particular team or following a specific sport....

Ricky Gervais’ sitcom Derek concluded its first season around the time Michael Haneke’s Amour won the Oscar for best foreign language film, and my viewing of both overlapped in a way that made comparison perhaps a bit more...

Who says that hearing voices is a bad thing?  As far as my television viewing habits go, I’ve been hearing them more frequently as of late, or, at least, I’ve been hearing those voice-overs that continue to characterize and add...

Today’s factual TV is all about formats: repeatable, exportable templates that can generate multiple episodes in a multitude of markets. Thanks to excellent collections of case studies like Tasha Oren and Sharon Sharaf’s Global...

In a previous post for CST I began thinking about the question of multiplatform quality. There I suggested that not only did different notions of quality circulate within the production cultures of television and digital media,...

So what will be the future of the internet? Is it a glorious new frontier that can never become a border, an ever-expanding sphere of meaning that is generated permissively and received chaotically? Or is it an increasingly...

In the past year as researcher on the Warwick and De Montfort Universities AHRC project A History of Television for Women in Britain (1947-89) I’ve been thinking a lot about women and situation comedy, and watching a lot of...

By the time this blog is published, Utopia will have finished its six episode run on Channel 4. If Poliakoff’s Dancing on the Edge was launched with one kind of hype (see Stephen Harper’s blog), Utopia was surrounded by hype of...

Last week the BBC revealed that the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special would be shown in 3D, not only on television via the BBC HD channel, but also in cinemas. In a playful announcement, executive producer Steven Moffat said...

Dancing on the Edge, the five-part BBC2 series whose final episode will be broadcast on Monday, has all the hallmarks of a late-period Stephen Poliakoff artefact: sumptuous settings; deep focus shots revealing a wealth of period...

There are times when television rules our house.   There are certain shows we watch with an intense level of concentration and involvement that even prohibits exchanging opinions until the credits roll.  At other times,...

Sadly the 18th January 2013 marked the end of Fringe – the little – much loved — telefantasy show that managed to hold out for five seasons against the odds at Fox, a channel notorious for cancelling cult SF shows in their...

One of the strange things about the people in soaps is that they don’t appear to watch television. Recently in EastEnders we have had several sights of a character slumped on the sofa with a faint sound of a soundtrack on the...